IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (TO INDIANA)!

A HISTORICAL GLANCE AT SPACE-RELATED OCCURRENCES IN NORTHERN INDIANA

Writer / Jeff Kenney

Photography Provided

This summer’s release of the new film “Asteroid City” in theaters worldwide provides as good an excuse as any (if any are really needed) to take a brief look at some space-related phenomena - specifically that of things flying in, or ostensibly so, from outer space to Indiana through the years.

While claims of UFO sightings are nothing new, you may or may not be aware that the Department of Defense established an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force in 2020, with a public congressional hearing on the matter in 2022, which itself was focused on a report issued the previous year.

Among other information made available is the fact that some 400 reports of unidentified aerial objects are on record, and 143 reports by military planes of such objects between 2004 and 2021 remain unexplained. The possibility of alien spacecraft can’t be ruled out, the report notes.

Such concerns, nationally or in the Hoosier state, have ebbed and flowed over the past 70-plus years. The U.S.

Air Force’s Project Blue Book was established during the peak era for UFO sightings in America - that is, the Cold War years of the 1950s and ‘60s, when popular references to potential alien invasion via

Local Real Estate Agent

movies, books and articles spurred widespread panic and likely mass phenomena of seeing-what-one-expected-to-see in the night skies. Through 1969, Project Blue Book reported more than 12,000 UFO sightings!

Among headline-making Indiana incidents: Hundreds of people reported seeing three flying saucers south of Indianapolis during this period, with military and police officials among the many witnesses. House sized and balloon shaped, these fiery-tailed oddities, glowing in the night sky, performed figureeight-style maneuvers and disappeared near Martinsville.

Among officially disproven suppositions was the March 1951 story of a Marion County farmer who found a red parachute and mechanism in his pasture that caused agitation of his chickens and cows. The object turned out to be a weather observation balloon.

Expectations of “flying saucers” were high enough that a group of Monticello-area businessmen claimed to have written a message to potential alien visitors using geometric designs to spell out the words, “Come in peace. Let us talk together,” and encouraging them to land on nearby Shafer Lake (some locals, it should be noted, decried the endeavor as a tourism-oriented stunt, which sounds more credible than the potential for alien landings).

A number of UFOs were reported in 1966, including in Lakes Magazine-readership areas in northwest Indiana.

Reports from around Valparaiso, Knox and Plymouth in March of that year included lights in the sky ranging from white to bright orange. Porter County Deputy Sheriff Fred Cook said that he, State Police Trooper Gary Whitledge, and Deputy Coroner Robert Watts tracked an object with a brilliant orange center and white fringes, moving at the speed of aircraft for some 15 miles away for about 15 minutes.

A trooper from the same state police post reported observing two egg-shaped, lighted objects for almost 10 minutes near U.S. Highway 30 south of Valparaiso, and Plymouth Police Sergeant Dennis Dreibelbis said he watched three egg-shaped objects circle Marshall County for more than three hours a few nights later.

Reports around Indianapolis and several cities in the vicinity, including by three deputy sheriffs, in the fall of 1966 described blueish balls of light that grew in size and faded into “an opaque mist.”

Oval-shaped UFOs were reported by a number of witnesses in the Connersville area in October of 1973, and a 1978 Associated Press report focused on Charles Tucker of Nappanee, Indiana, regional director of Mutual UFO Network, Inc., who reported that at least 23 “strong” reports of UFO sightings had taken place in Indiana in thenrecent years.

By 1988, the same Mutual UFO Network was represented by Mount Vernon, Indiana, resident Francis L. Ridge, who, in an interview with the Evansville Press, said that 67 of 130 national sightings in 1987 were located in Indiana. Ridge detailed a group effort by Network members to capture a reported phenomenon near Corydon, Indiana, of orange lights appearing and disappearing in the sky. Ridge had a videotape showing moving light approaching an airplane.

Another spate of Lakes-area sightings took place shortly after when, in November of 1990, dozens of reports in the Culver area were referenced in the Culver Citizen newspaper, whose editor, Fred Karst, said “quite a few calls” had been coming in describing alleged nearby UFO sightings.

One of these was from a security guard who described “a white, triangular-shaped light pattern.” Some chalked the phenomena up to activities at the Grissom Air Force Base near Peru, Indiana, but officials at the base dismissed the idea.

In April 2008, Kokomo, Indiana, experienced a mild panic when a highdecibel, house-shaking boom caused multiple calls to 911 and subsequent investigation by police, firefighters and Homeland Security. Accompanying the sound were reports of large, orange balls of light in the sky.

And let’s not forget the most visible manifestation of alien invasion in Indiana - the classic 1977 science fiction movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which took place near Muncie, Indiana!

Meteors Galore

Meanwhile, less-sentient invaders from outer space have struck Indiana in the form of meteorites.